Warp Wraith, page 38
She just didn’t know if he would be in time.
“Good,” Ingrid replied with a quiver to her voice. The chiseled edges of her face softened slightly. Edie recognized the hint of fear there—not for herself, but for him. She’d known there was something extra between the lycanthrope and her dhampir leader; but only in that moment did Edie really see it.
“Good,” Ingrid repeated hoarsely. Her eyes darted over the lip of the trench and narrowed. “Now, you may want to make certain the others know it.”
The rumble from the south intensified till it was more than sound, was an itch in the gut, a liquidity in the marrows. Edie focused on the gun droid’s view again in her helmet visor. Movement near the wreckage of the Behemoth drew her attention instantly. Scorched trunks of trees were coming down—knocked over. Ash swirled for the sky in a tremendous, roiling stain. Sunlight flashed off a terrible, gray mass of metal, barging up the road, its skirts plowing wreckage clear.
A massive, smoke stack-sized cannon poked through the smoke of the blown Behemoth. The rest of a hull pushed into sight, smashing aside the glowing hunks of its slain cousin. The newly-arrived Behemoth emerged in its full, horrid glory; bristling with secondary weapons as well as its main one, whose muzzle was even now pivoted towards the Gap and the ruins at the top.
Edie drew in a long, rattling breath. She’d gone to a place beyond fear, where her core had emptied out to leave only a bleak exhaustion. Ingrid muttered something beside her, some Fenreir curse that sound like a pronouncement of doom.
“The 403 was coming up behind us, Captain,” Doga piped up from her left. “They were bringing armor! Should be here any time!”
The pinched cheeriness in the officer’s voice sent a stab of irritation through Edie that almost turned to rage. From Moff’s growling, it had already done that for him—the little man trembled and clenched, looked like he might hit Doga. Outdated light hovers stolen from Theocracy caches early in the war and probably barely-functional, she thought with a clenching of teeth. Is he serious?
But he was. And catching a look from Ingrid, she knew what the were-woman had meant earlier.
“That’s right,” she answered Doga and glowered at Moff. She raised her voice. “That’s right, people! We’ve just got to hold ‘em here, long enough for the Wraith to finish it!” She tapped her helmet mic. “Hutch, you still there?”
“Not going anywhere, Captain.”
“Can you patch me through across all frequencies, ours and the Brigades’?”
“You got it!” A pause. “You’re on, Captain!”
“Hardcases,” Edie called into her mic, forcing combativeness into her tone, “Furies, Freedom Brigades, this is Edie Sundown. For those who don’t know, my people and I have been holding this damned pass for two days, now. We’ve put in a lot of damned work. The Warp Wraith’s going to make sure that’s not for nothing. But he can’t do it alone. We’ve all got to pitch in! We’ve all got to be the Wraith today! Do you hear me?”
Cheers erupted from the trench around her—even Moff joining the cheer.
“Do you?!?!?” she bellowed at the top of her lungs.
The whole of the Kraggar Gap echoed with the cheers, and for a moment Edie didn’t even hear the approach of durasteel death.
Chapter 20
“THIS IS Restoration,” the voice of the corvette’s captain cried out across the tactical network, “they’re all over us! We’re in the trouble!”
“On my way!” Callisto replied, though with a pair of Orloks on his tail, he wasn’t sure how he was going to make that happen.
The closest of his pursuers put a burst of azure fire across his starboard shields. Turning into this, Callisto slammed the throttle forward and veered out of the Orlok’s firing arc for a precious fraction of a second. It was enough time for him to saw back on the throttle, killing his forward motion, and then feather the maneuvering fields to send him into an end-over-end tumble.
Stars lashed past his nose as the Slayer backflipped while still careening through the void on its forward momentum. Streaks of metal whipped before him, passed across his targeting reticle, then into the torrent of his blaster fire as he crushed his trigger. The nearest exploded with shocking violence, flinging shreds of itself in every direction. A glowing twist of it ricocheted across Callisto’s port deflector. Any even larger shred ripped through the wing of the Orlok’s partner, sending the crippled fighter spinning down into the blue-green light of Circe.
Kicking the maneuvering fields again, Callisto flipped his Slayer once more and hit the thrusters, sent it shooting up and away from the suddenly very-near atmosphere. But that hardly put him out of danger.
The skies over Circe were a tapestry of destruction. Shafts of white fire cut back and forth between the durasteel giants of the fleets. Explosions filled space with curtains of debris that glittered as they fell into the ionosphere below and began to ignite. Atmosphere bleeding from rent hulls clouded the void between combatants. Through this wheeled a blizzard of starfighters fighting to survive.
The Revenants’ battle pass had them sliding straight into the midst of the Theocracy ships. Brula’s plan may have been to side-swipe them, but the enemy response had been to turn in place and block their way through. The Revenants had been forced to decelerate and engage in a titanic, nearly point-blank pummeling. There were no tactics; everything had dissolved into a ship-to-ship scrum more akin to some ancient, seaborne melee.
Callisto juked to starboard to avoid another Slayer—maybe Kylie—pursuing an Orlok, then juked the opposite direction to avoid a probably-unaimed turbo-blaster bolt. Restoration wasn’t hard to find, drifting off Vengeful’s port and slightly above her horizontal plane—and wreathed in fire as Orloks swarmed about her.
“Slayer One-One,” Callisto called in a voice raspy from overuse, “heading for Restoration. Any help appreciated!”
No response came from the Slayer channel as he put on speed and pulled back on the stick, climbing past Vengeful for the beleaguered corvette. He ground his teeth, not wanting to think too hard on what that meant.
Orange flames belched from one of Restoration’s bulky thrusters and the unit blackened and went dead. The others were flickering fitfully and a chain of small explosions walked along its spine as an Orlok strafed. The wounded corvette had enough power and fight for one of its ventral gun turrets to track on and put a blast into the passing fighter, spinning it into glowing shrapnel. But more were lining up to its aft for another run.
Callisto steered to starboard, easing off the thrusters as he passing in front of Restoration, then banking to port. This put him above the corvette’s axis of flight and standing up on his port wing. He wheeled once to put himself on a head-on approach, streaking straight over the corvette’s top side and right at the Slayers approaching for a tail shot.
Restoration’s ventral guns smeared one of the three oncoming fighters from existence. The addition of Callisto’s barrage as he shot over the corvette and sailed out past her thruster package split the remaining two. He wrenched the stick to starboard, pursuing what looked like a squadron leader from the markings. A burst from his blasters sent the Orlok into a reverse back to port, into a long arc.
Callisto knew the leader was luring him after, while his wing mate looped around from the opposite direction. He decided to let it happen, peppering the leader’s tail while scanning to port. Unsurprisingly, his sensors, then his eye caught the glint of the other Orlok cutting the chord of his half-circle course of pursuit, coming on with Callisto’s profile nicely centered before them.
At the first flash of inbound blaster bolts, Callisto wrenched to port and turned into the ambusher’s attack. Perhaps realizing he hadn’t been fooled, the Orlok was already slewing to his right. A hit skittered across Callisto’s starboard shield and something banged to aft, gave the starfighter an unhealthy shudder. But his own guns were already spewing in response, converting the Orlok into a silently-expanding fire globe.
Wrenching back to starboard, Callisto sought for the squad leader—who would almost assuredly would have turned at his teammate’s attack to catch him in a pincer. The Orlok was there, suspended like a metallic predator in space above Callisto. The pilot realized he was on a collision course and, rather than fire, veered to the left.
Callisto had time for a single shot and put it squarely through the eyeball viewport. He caught a flash inside the cockpit as his Slayer and the Orlok ripped past one another at a distance of barely meters. The other fighter continued into a long dive for the surface of Circe, acquiring a tail of fire as it began to burn up.
A horrid yellow-red flare stole any satisfaction Callisto might have felt at the double-kill. Turning back for the Restoration, he found the corvette beginning to come apart. An explosion had sent the cluster of her thrusters breaking away from their mountings, filling space like tumbling garbage cannisters. The rest of the hull split down the center, decks tearing apart and a cloud of escaping atmosphere and debris swallowing much of the long, bulbous shaft.
Callisto’s guts shriveled. Everywhere he looked he saw the fight turning against them.
A massive burp of sparks escaped one of Vengeful’s engines as the module died. The battlecruiser continued its course into the midst of the melee, putting out blasts in every direction, but losing speed. Orloks strafed along her flanks, leaving glowing wounds all along her hull.
Mauler was streaking along the Theocracy’s right flank, getting into the aft-arc of a badly-outmaneuvered Mangler. Quantum torpedoes leapt like a silvery daisy-chain of death from the frigate to claw the Mangler’s tail apart. But that victory was eclipsed as the Desolator sailed past both of them, lashing space all around. Turbo-blaster bolts hammered Vengeful and Peltast simultaneously, then lurched out for the frigate, Payback, lingering at Peltast’s flank. Already savaged by Orlok sorties, Payback blew apart at the first touch of the dreadnought’s fire.
White lightning shafted up from Circe to glaze Desolator’s belly in cataclysm. The violence of the fusion blast from Malvik was enough to force Callisto’s canopy and sensors to polarize against the flash. But when that cleared, despair soured his blood; the dreadnought remained, still in the fight and cutting directly for Vengeful now.
Pings from his comm computer drew Callisto’s attention. From the unwinding yarn ball of Restoration’s demise, icons shot clear; escape pods. Distress calls pulsed out from them as lingering Orloks suddenly dived in amongst the oblong craft, bursting them into shrapnel with contemptuous jolts of plasma.
Despair seared away before rage as Callisto whipped his Slayer into a turn. He couldn’t change the fight now, not in one Slayer. But he could stop another massacre like Lydiria, here, in the space over Circe. What difference that would make in all bedlam around him, he couldn’t say—it might only matter to him.
An Orlok intent on its kill died without knowing who dealt the fatal shots. Speeding past the fireball, Callisto veered after a second Orlok, breaking desperately to get clear. This one showed more skill than its fellows and reversed course, cutting to starboard and climbing from sight. But the space before Callisto was littered with targets; he’d plunged into a cloud of enemies.
Damage alarms and proximity warnings warbling in the cockpit around him, Callisto knew he was dead. A blast crunched off his port deflector. Red flashes from the systems display told him that shield was dead. Hostile icons speckled his scanners like fireflies. A surge of speed from his thrusters pushed him through that, but they lurched after him as a whole, a half dozen clinging to his tail.
Got ‘em away from the escape pods, at least. A few might have time to make the atmosphere and escape in their reentry blazes. The future they could expect on the surface would be uncertain, to say the least. But at least they’d have one.
An Orlok blast crunched into his aft shields and the Slayer convulsed as an explosion kicked sparks and fragments clear of its spine. Forks of electricity hissed forward into the cockpit, snapping at Callisto, who flung up a hand as they bit for his face. Reflexively, he threw the Slayer into a port-side veer, then a dive.
Circe’s blue-green glow filled Callisto’s existence. A new alarm squalled from his console and an indicator warned of both the angle of his descent and the rising temperature on his now-unshielded hull. But those were the least of his worries as short-circuiting electronics continued to fry him. Batting frantically to the left, he smacked the systems panel, managed to kill power to the now-burst shield generator. That snuffed out the snakes of ionizing wires, but left him plummeting for the planet, utterly naked.
A cyan spear chopped down after him. A glance at his fluttering tactical display showed him at least one Orlok still in pursuit. And that’s that, he thought with a sudden cooling of the nerves. Pulling out of the dive would leave his silhouette exposed to his foe; continuing it likely meant burning up. Pick your end...
Callisto pulled back on the stick, feeling the Slayer resist. A splatter of blaster bolts rained down around him, whipping closer and closer. A targeting alarm squealed from the early-warning display. His eye caught a black dot breaking through a white smear of cloud cover, far below, but climbing fast. Three more joined it, all propelled on bluey shafts of anti-matter drives.
What the—
From the leader, a spike of white leapt and ripped past Callisto to port. The beam spitted the Orlok on his tail like an insect pinned to a display board. Shockwave hammered down on Callisto’s Slayer and he was obliged to finish his tearing maneuver out of the dive, just to evade fiery wreckage plummeting down after him.
The foursome of new arrivals rocketed up past Callisto. Sawing his way against gravity and back into a climb, he caught a glimpse of their vaguely-arachnid profiles. Stings of energy fire biting out from their top-mounted “tail” modules confirmed their identities.
“Callisto,” an impossibly familiar voice taunted across the tactical network, “were you planning on work today?”
“ROGER, YOU CRAZY DEVIL!”
Malik grinned with what remained of his face under the mask, feeling good—better than that; feeling alive. “Stay on us,” he ordered. “Call for any and all available help.”
“Will try,” Callisto replied through a splutter of static, “but that’s not going to be a lot.”
“Anything will do.”
Early warning readouts at the copilot’s station to Malik’s left reddened and blatted. Skraar jabbed them into silence with a thumb and fingered the gunnery controls with his right hand. “We’ve got company.”
Malik could see that, red icons on the heads-up hologram as numerous as carrion startled from a kill. These resolved quickly into metallic glints the naked eye could see out the forward canopy. But rather than evade, Malik steered into them.
“Send them on their way.”
Skraar thumbed the weapons selector on his control stick, waited for a pinging of target acquisition to merge into a single note, and squeezed the trigger. The Scorpiod quaked to a chain of bangs along its flank armor. That would be the pods there shedding their protective plate to uncover antimatter missile racks, then shuddering as they released their loads.
White-sparking whisps of missile trails blossomed out from the Scorpiod’s sides and arched together towards the onrushing Orloks. Their formation squirmed and began to break up instantly at the salvo. One or two opened-fire with their blasters, clawing missiles from their front and riding through the explosions. Those that tried to flee were swept away on the wavefront of detonating warheads. For a moment, the space before the Scorpiod was a garden of hell-blossoms.
An Orlok shot through the expanding debris, pulsing out blasts at them. Cyan beams skittered across the port shields. Skraar muttered something and flicked the weapons selector before crushing his trigger again. The Scorpiod’s side-mounted heavy blasters snarled. The Orlok dodged, but that only carried it into the fire from the other Scorpiods. A last bloom of destruction expanded, then faded, leaving the fight open before them.
“That was our whole complement,” Skraar growled, sounding more like he was complaining about being short of food than ordnance.
Malik ignored his tone and keyed his commlink. “Everyone else, save you missiles for the capital ships.”
“Couple volleys of short-range missiles aren’t going to breach a Ravager’s shields,” Skraar noted blandly.
“Glad you’re here to provide such useful advice!” Malik quipped back with enough edge to bite. “And we don’t have to breach them; we just need the enemy to think we can!”
The grizzled Fenreir shot Malik a looked that either signaled comprehension or resignation to his fate. “Chief.” The word sounded like the latter.
The angle of the Scorpiods’ climb was bringing them up to the rear of the sprawling fight in orbit. The Desolator was plunging straight through that, wading into the midst of the melee like the largest brawler in a barroom fight. That made little sense; even a ship as massive and heavily-armed as the dreadnought was vulnerable to crossfire. Likely, its commander had faced little choice after the Revenants’ surprise arrival—break through or be cornered.
Malik steered for starboard, approaching the dreadnought from aft, where its rear-arc weaponry was thin. Much of the space giant’s attention remained on the ships passing to its flanks and the long, gunmetal gray silhouette of Vengeful directly ahead. A crippled Ravager was falling behind its flank, consumed in secondary explosions and beginning a long, fiery plunge, tail-first towards Circe.
Through that inferno came Mauler, the torpedo frigate peppering Desolator’s flank with its quantum projectiles. The larger ship’s starboard shields fluttered to a chain of direct hits, but didn’t give out. Its return fire staggered the frigate in space. But more dangerous to Mauler was the swarm of starfighter vultures, wheeling about it and picking away at its armored flesh with their blaster-fire beaks.
